


The High Places

by shelter



Category: Warrior Nun (TV)
Genre: Afterlife, Manipulation, Multi, Short Stories, Spiritual events
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:21:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26024881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shelter/pseuds/shelter
Summary: The tattoos on Father Vincent's flesh form an ever-changing panorama showing Sister Shannon's death and Adriel's ascension.Michael Salvius only uses two colours in his pencil case: gold and blood red.And Sister Lilith, looking heavenwards, only sees the eternal flames of hellfire.orThree supernatural bodies. Three different endings.
Relationships: Sister Lilith/Shotgun Mary (Warrior Nun)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 31





	1. Father

**Author's Note:**

> This work was inspired by this Tumblr post by [ mswyrr](https://mswyrr.tumblr.com/post/624191108217503744/extradimensional-influence-and-warrior-nun) who, analysing Season 1, pointed out three extra-dimensional/ supernatural characters (Father Vincent, Michael Salvius & Sister Lilith) with unresolved plotlines.

**1.**

**Father**

.

.

_"Soften your tread. Methinks the earth's surface is but bodies of the dead._  
_Walk slowly in the air, so you do not trample on the remains of God's servants."_  
**\- Abu al-Ala' al-Ma'arri**

* * *

.

Father Vincent has a tattoo of Sister Shannon's death.

He doesn't know how it's possible. But when he rolls up his sleeves on the night of the ill-fated raid, he sees an image coalescing in blue on his shoulder. A halo-bearer, reaching out to masked fighters. Her hair is a shroud, her arms are a mess of stigmata, her body a plank of darkest black.

He hasn't read Sister's Beatrice's report. He knows Mary will seek him out soon. He thinks he should request a confession from Sister Lilith too.

Now, he stares at the warping shades of ink in the mirror. They're cloudy with disturbed skin, as if he's just been inked and the images haven't yet settled. Pocks of divinium form a starry sky on the dome of his shoulder. When the writhing tentacles of black finally stop moving, he sees the likeness of Shannon's face on the corpse, eyes closed. Beside her lie the sketchy outlines of other warrior nuns who've fallen in battle.

But he can't tear his eyes of the rendering of her face, halo-ed like a saint. While her body is studded with blue.

* * *

When the new halo-bearer escapes from the Cat's Cradle, Father Vincent thinks he knows where she is. He avoids the Mother Superion's questions, sequesters himself in his study. When he's sure he won't be disturbed, he undoes his collar, strips the shirt he wears, already coated with sweat at the knowledge of his revelation.

In the mirror, he sees the tattoo on his back: a detailed rendering of Lucifer's banishment from heaven. The likenesses of Father, Son and Spirit occupy the hallowed points of his shoulders and the crown of his spine. Lucifer reaches out from his tailbone. The fires of hell and its accompanying demons lick and crawl up his calves and heels. A grand assembly of angels, saints, apostles, popes, nuns and onlookers form a vortex of action from the wings of his shoulders down to his butt cheeks.

The universe of his tattoo writhes as he moves.

At his abdomen, an inky sea pulses with every movement he makes. Here, divinium-speckled figures glow. Perched on a ship, they look into the central column, observing the beautiful angel's fall from God's favour. One of the figures has a blue halo in her back.

Every time he looks at this diorama, it changes. Sometimes there are other figures with the halo-bearer. Sometimes their arms are reaching out to her. Sometimes, from another angle, they look like they're stabbing her.

Maybe it's just the way the tattoos look on his body now as he arches his back to observe. Or maybe and more likely, he thinks, his tattoos have a spirit of their own.

Someone knocks. He dresses himself, adjusts his collar. In the mirror, there are no more swirling, swooping images. Just his pale hands and the trench of sweat lining his forehead.

* * *

"Those tattoos. They're special, aren't they?" Mary asks.

They're driving back to headquarters the scenic way: an endless ruffle of Andalusian ridges and low hills as far as the eye can see. Father Vincent keeps his eyes on the switchbacks as evening hems in their car. A darkening girdle of low cloud blips the horizon. His hands are even on the wheel, sheathed in sleeves.

"They're not your concern, sister."

"If they affect the mission, they're damn well a concern."

"They're relics –" he says.

"As in like church relics?"

"Relics of my past."

"And you didn't tell me, after all these years, about–"

"My past is not up for discussion."

"I trusted you, Father."

"And I trust you will understand."

The engine whines as he negotiates the gradient. He still sees Mary, slouched against the passenger-side window as far away from him as possible, with one hand in the dark cut of her jacket–

As he banks the wheel for a right turn, something strange happens. The road becomes swaddled in fog. Everything in the car narrows into a hush, like between the heaves of a storm. His arm, feeling heavy, begins to ache.

His skin feels like a torque of heat. Something – can it be his tattoos – strangles his right arm, manipulating his muscles – guiding him towards Mary, to reach that gun he knows is hidden in the dark space of her jacket – his trigger finger cocked in anticipation of firing–

"Hey. Watch it!"

The car mounts a kerb. His nose bashes itself into the wheel. When he next stares at the road, the fog's gone. The sky is a crystal vault of stars. Mountain villages are clusters of light threaded together by the lit strings of roads.

The crippling reflex in his arm is replaced by a soreness in his shoulders at holding the wheel.

"You sure you don't want me to drive?" Mary asks.

* * *

There are so many lies. So many. He doesn't know what's the truth anymore. Or of the truth even exists.

He doesn't really know what's under the Vatican in Adriel's Tomb. Is it even a tomb? When the warrior nuns open it, will they be returning to the natural order of things? Or will they be unleashing the apocalypse?

This uncertainty has been crawling up his spine ever since they landed in Rome. Literally. Through his shirt, he can almost feel the tattoos thrashing into motion on his skin, disturbed by the earth-altering events they're about to unleash.

But one in particular. He feels it clinging to his back. It squirms from its position at the base of his back up his spine.

As he carries the fallen halo-bearer Ava, he knows exactly what it is.

Lucifer, the handsome cast-down angel, ascending back into heaven, rising across his sore, tightening flesh.

He isn't expecting to see his master. But when he does, the divinium scarring his skin is glowing. His clothes can't hide it. He's almost like a weapon waiting to be unleashed, a glowing bomb infused with divinum. 

"No. Not now," Father Vincent says.

"Your only order is to obey," Adriel says in return.

Father Vincent doesn't want to look at Adriel. Instead, he finds solace in the hard, fierce anger etched on Mary's face.

"I trusted you, Father," he hears Mary voice in his head.

"So did I," he says.

His fingers twitching, Father Vincent undoes the cuffs on his sleeves. Black wisps spill from his exposed skin. He lets the blackness itching on his skin manifest into complete chaos around him.

.

.

.

 _End Chapter 1_


	2. Son

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael Salvius draws, colours in gold and red, and waits for when he can finally go outside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is an interval chapter, between the sheer weight of Father Vincent's tattoos and Lilith's un-burdening of her self.

**2.**

**Son**

.

.

.

All morning, Michael watches men die.

If he focuses, really concentrates, he can activate the tiny blue stars in his fingers. The touchscreen computer on the frame of his bed responds to it, and he issues prompt commands just by flicking his wrist in the air.

At his prompting, the video player finds, records and plays old television footage of human catastrophes and massacres. At first he watches scenes of bloated bodies like balloons and dead children on some foreign hillside.

He sees the crescents of blood, the stalled rivulets of red around these human victims of disaster, and wonders why he doesn't leak the same way. Mother and her tutors have taught him science and anatomy, but he doesn't have an explanation to why his skin bruises into grey, and then dissolves into bluish-black.

So he views the entirety of human tragedy to find an answer. Sometimes he prefers it with sound – bullets tapping, tanks creaking over bones, tsunamis crushing, storm surging – as background music while he colours.

When he hears the air lock of his open hiss open, he cuts the video. He focuses on his drawings so he doesn't have to explain what he's doing.

"Hello Michael."

"Hi."

"How are you today?"

"Bored," he says, truthfully. "How does this look?"

"Nice. That's a lot of gold. Hmm… Is this an angel?"

"What's an angel?"

"Supernatural beings from stories. They come from a place called heaven and have wings."

"I don't know," Michael shrugs. "I just draw what I see."

"Why don't you draw what you see when you're watching on TV?"

"I'm getting tired of drawing–"

"Ah Michael–"

"I want to go outside. How long more?" Michael asks.

"Soon."

"How soon?"

"Very soon, I promise."

"Then I won't have to stay in his room anymore?"

"I can't guarantee that."

Michael puts down the colour pencils and his paper. "Then why wait until then? Why not now?"

He closes his eyes. But all he sees in the dark of his head are grainy, shaky camera images of what he's seen on his video player, tinged with blue specks. Sabra and Shatila. Cyclone Nargis. The Tohoku Earthquake. Close combat B-roll from the sieges of Aleppo, Raqqa, Mosul and Aden. The M23 Rebellion.

He replaces his yellow colour pencil with red, its nib blunt from overuse. On the figure he's sketched, he overlays the gold trim with chunks of red in the background, pressing down hard.

"Michael, why do you only use two colours?"

"I'm sick of blue. Blue here. Blue everywhere."

"I'm sorry, Michael–"

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me, you know."

He endures a sigh of disappointment. Hands gently disgorge his headphones, leaving them necklaced around his neck.

"Do you trust me, Michael?"

"Only you know how I feel – you know that."

They link hands. His arm begins to emit an ocean blue light. The bruises in his skin, cracked and scaly, pulse with ocean blue where the scabs have healed. But instead of the tingling sensation he usually feels, his senses are flooded with peace.

"I can't promise you'll be out of this place." A pause. Michael waits. "But I promise you things will get better."

"I know."

"You're blessed and gifted. When you go outside, you'll be just like me."

"Like you?"

"Yes. Different. Transcendent. When your Mother completes the portal, you can join me outside."

"Then what will happen to me. And Mother?"

"You'll be my representative here, overseeing your mother's works for me."

"But–"

"Will you keep this pact between us, young Michael?"

"Yes, sir."

"Sir?"

Michael hesitates as he anoints him, rubbing the rough pads of his fingers over the eyes. After he withdraws his hand, Michael sees things differently: the details in the walls, the circuits firing in his video player. He sees the inner tangled intestines of Mother's machines, the breathing bashing pulse of the strange ancient shield in the next room, its connecting wires veins bursting with the watery gates of blood. Gates which open and let this man into his life. 

When he looks at the man before him, all he sees is a corona of fire. Pure gold. The only thing not gold are his hands, which are sleeved in red.

"I mean, Mister Adriel," Michael says.

"You're a good boy, Michael," he says. "A perfect ally as we burn all the blood away to purify and harvest this earth."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short piece to wrap up Michael's arc in the TV series. I wanted to write my own version of how Adriel could communicate with him, and possibly what he needed Michael for. Michael, in turn, is probably really twisted from being hidden away for so long.


	3. Spirit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the long shadow of Adriel searches for them, Lilith watches over Mary, hoping she'll wake up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter of this short series. This spun off in ways I didn't intend to, but this is my take on Lilith's 'final' form.

**3.**

**Spirit**

**.**

**.**

**.**

They burn what's left of Father Vincent in a pit at the end of a country road outside Florence. Letters, photographs, and the rosaries he gave them. Then, they burn their uniforms and habits too.

Beatrice and Ava stand so close Lilith can't see the outline of the fire between their bodies. Camila, her hair unleashed at last, warms her hands over the flames.

Lilith watches. She doesn't want to leave Mary's side. Even after all they've done – Camila's knowledge of field medicine, Beatrice's ability to make a working tourniquet from any fabric – Mary still hasn't regained consciousness. She lies tucked into the backseat of their stolen car, dried blood making the leathery seats shiny.

She hates herself for thinking it, but it’s the most peaceful she's seen Mary – ever.

Later, as they discuss where to go next, Lilith looks south, towards Rome. A thick gauze of red-tinged mushroom cloud rises on the horizon, twisting its way across the sky. Ribbons of wispy crimson reach out in all directions like slow-motion tentacles, high in the atmosphere. Hell flexing its wings.

"We need to go," she tells them. "Far away from here."

* * *

So they head back to Spain, back to the Cat's Cradle.

For Lilith, nothing matters as long as they put as much distance as possible from that red smear of cloud growing on the horizon, swallowing all in its path.

They crash at a church one night, the mountains massing outside like hunched shoulders. As the girls huddle around each other to keep warm, Lilith does sentry duty.

She does it because she doesn't feel either the cold or fatigue creeping into her bones. But she prefers staying in the car with the still-comatose Mary.

Her breath fogs the windows. The tired engine sings a soundtrack of clicks all night.

Lilith thinks of fire: votive candles dying at the stubs in church, the bonfire of Father Vincent on the first day, the ungodly heat of wherever she went after she got stabbed trying to wrest the halo from Ava. As she imagines this, Lilith senses the heat tickling her skin. It feels like rough fabric, the rich current of static electricity.

She cups Mary's face to keep her warm. When she thinks Mary's looking too pale, she traces the hyphens of scars on her face, warming them with the fire in her fingertips.

* * *

Their route straddles the mountains, and they crest the Great St. Bernard Pass at the border with Switzerland. They stop at the monastery at the top of the pass to ask for directions and charity.

Her fever flares and the recurring ache in her old stab wound bites away at her abdomen. The skin around her fingernails peels away in shards of divinium. She pauses before stepping over the threshold into the chapel. She waits until the others are inside, then goes to dry heave by the road side.

This far up the mountain, she sees a stretch of lesser peaks hustled with clouds, all the way down the road where they'll go. Behind, Lilith sees the horizon tainted with dark, menacing storms.

"Almost there," she says to no one. But she hopes Mary can hear her.

She advances towards the chapel, wondering why the others are taking so long. The sun's blazing high, casting the monastery into stark sharp shapes on the snow. In the lunar quality of high mountain light, Lilith steps out of the monastery's shadow – and sees nothing but the intense reflection of roadside snow.

She stands staring at the snow until the others return. Before they can ask any questions, she retreats to Mary's side.

* * *

Beatrice can't stop her hands from shaking. Camila will not sleep without a weapon with her. And Ava suffers from nightmares.

Lilith feels – no, sees – them as vague outlines of things that they've experienced together: shadowy scenes of Ava's time in the tomb under the Vatican. A hooded phantom of a man that walks through walls, dusting red smoke wherever he goes. Then Ava wakes screaming, asking them to run, scraping the hair from her face as if she's on fire.

She knows Ava's nightmares set Beatrice and Camila on edge. So she seeks out Ava and confronts her directly.

"Wait, how do you know I have–?" Ava asks.

"Talk it out. Talk it out to Mary. Tell her everything."

"Did I tell you you're crazy?"

She tells Ava to tell Mary instead. She gives them the privacy they need. She wanders the dark, the cold night seeping through her robes. Occasionally, she stops, sits and closes her eyes. She mimics the act of sleeping. But she never allows herself to drift. Because she struggles like Ava: these moments of rest are the violent prelude of her time in that other place.

Instead she counts the things she's grateful for, always ending with Beatrice, Camila, Ava and Mary.

When the stars begin to prick through the greenish sky, she returns. In the car, Ava has dozed off. Her arms hang like a necklace around Mary's neck. Lilith buries them both in blankets.

* * *

On a frigid winter's evening at a boarding house for pilgrims in the south of France, Lilith drifts in and out of consciousness. The downward press of her fever on her head makes her hallucinate. She claws the side of her bed so hard it leaves splinters of wood under her nails.

For once, there's no one with her. Beatrice and Camila are at vespers, at the insistence of her hosts. Ava's with Mary. So she gives room to her pain, the processes she can't name transforming her body–

She makes it to the bathroom just to throw up into the sink.

Lilith blinks away her fatigue. Sweat bleeds out from her every pore. Slugs of vomit in the sink boil and steam in the unheated bathroom. Gunk cakes her eyelashes.

The skin from her wound sheds in planes of hardened ash. Her fingers smoke. Her knuckles swell like pale hills, hunkered down and ready. And on her back, two ridges of muscle decorate either side of her spine. Every time she hunches, the skin hardens and pulses, growing into blue-flecked scar tissue, as if something's ready to spring forth.

"Who are you?" she asks her refection of herself.

The mirror in the bathroom crystallises at her voice.

* * *

They return to Spain. They hear about mass hysteria and widespread possessions taking place in the south. A permanent stain of anvil-shaped red thunderclouds stalks them from Barcelona to Valencia, and to Seville. The roads leading towards home are ominously empty. When they do meet people, Lilith wears a coat to conceal the changes in her body.

Then, on the last switchback, before the Cat's Cradle can come into view, something hits the car.

A bullet – a missile – something – burst through the windshield and out from the back. It happens so fast no one sees anything. Until Ava starts to scream.

Glass speckles on Lilith's skin. Blood flecks the remains of the windshield. Beatrice slumps to the steering wheel, her neck a collar of mush.

"Get her behind!" Lilith orders.

Camila and Ava drag Beatrice into the back seat, as Lilith takes the wheel. The car spirals, dancing by the rails guarding the edge where the cliff ends. But with the yawn of brakes and a tug of slippery steering wheel, she manages to keep them from falling to certain death.

Lilith looks down the road to home. She thinks she can see their attackers: maybe fellow warrior nuns, maybe Adriel's followers. She doesn't stop to think. She hits reverse, turns back down the road and drives. 

* * *

She drives until evening stirs shadows from all sides. Beyond the mountains a big apricot moon hangs in the sky. Beatrice's haggard breaths curl smoke into the cold air.

"She needs medical help!" Camila says.

"Is there a hospital in the next town over?" Ava this time.

But Lilith keeps her eyes on the road, making turns and staying on the mountain road. She doesn't know where she's going. All she knows is there's a place lodged in the back of her mind–

She pulls into a mountain hamlet. Houses cling to ledges, and files of trees patrol the hills. A solitary streetlight shines, buttering the façade of an old church with yellow light. She stops the car, and asks Ava to bring Beatrice inside.

"Is this an Order-affiliated church?" Camila asks.

"I don't know."

"Then why–"

"I don't know!"

She sees Ava carry Beatrice inside, the gaping red smile of her neck wound visible even in the piss-coloured light. Camila – calm, controlled, rational Camila – is gripped by a squirrelly intensity that makes her keep looking between their car and the church.

"Listen Camila," Lilith says. "Go inside. Keep Beatrice alive."

"And where–?"

Lilith gets into car, continues on the only one road through town. The bubble of sickly light tinting the church's porch recedes into the distance. Alone in the car with the unmoving Mary, she feels flush with purpose, resolute with the pain buzzing on her back.

"It would be great if you could wake up now," Lilith says, looking at Mary in the rearview mirror, "Please?"

* * *

Mary doesn't stir. Even when Lilith takes two sharp turns up from the town, car's headlights lurching cutting through the thick syrupy dark. Even when Lilith comes to an abrupt stop as the road degrades into scree.

She's above the town. Shattered trees and misshapen gravestones struggle to stand from the hillside. Slabs of ruined stone pour to the earth. She doesn't know why she's come here now. Through the sticks of naked trees she spots the lone streetlight, now flickering madly. She sees why: a sliding chain of cars crawl up the mountain road, trailing a viscous thread of lights. Behind them, the land dwindles into fog, a fortress of advancing red clouds smothering the moon.

Lilith sighs. She knows this is it. No more running. She wants to pray. But her faith, everything she's believed up to now, is like the road she's on: asphalt crumbling into dust and broken stones.

Still, she tries anyway. She closes her eyes and thinks aloud Mary's favourite Psalm. _I lift my eyes to the hills – where does my help come from–_

Something beneath her vibrates. The car's headlights die. A breeze rifles through her hair.

_– the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night–_

Talons of pain seize her back. Misfiring synapses burn through her fingertips. And all around her, shadows begin to move, violent ruptures of energy.

Lilith doesn't complete Mary's Psalm, before she's bent over on the ground. The breeze sharpens, feels like nails on her face. The ground feels like a mattress of thorns. The pain intensifies. When she opens her mouth to scream, nothing comes out. Just the minerally sourness of blood.

When the agony breaks, Lilith knows something's different. She feels lighter, blunt force feeling of the wind extends from her face to–

She's surrounded by fiery beings, materialising over the graves. They wear flamboyant feral grins, their arms extended into bladed muscles. She was taught the word for them by the Mother Superion: Tarasks.

One of them confronts her. She flinches. But he – no, she – calls her name in a guttural growl. On her head is a crown of horns, her back massing with shifting muscles. Lilith's mesmerised by her face, a torrent of warped flames.

"It's time to embrace who you are, sister," the horned Tarask says.

"What am I?"

"One of us."

And the horned Tarask presents her with what she thinks is a wiggling, writhing halo.

* * *

"Will you wake up now, Mary?"

In the claustrophobic tightness of the car, she presents to Mary the horned Tarask's gift. When nothing happens, she smooths the hair on Mary's face, lowers her face to kiss her–

She kisses back.

"Mary?"

"Damn. I just had the strangest dream."

Then: "Lilith? What are those things on your back?"

* * *

She leads them down the mountain to the town. Down to the street with the dying streetlight. Down to the church besieged on all sides by men and women hazy with red smoke. Down to where the the Monster from the tomb in Rome stands in a tornado of red clouds.

When the others see her, they cower. But Lilith reaches out, her hand now a gauze of crackling skin and curdling fire. Camila reacts first, and when she realises who it is, she throws her arms around Lilith's neck.

"You came back!"

"Are those – wings?" is all Ava can ask.

Lilith goes on her knees to look at Beatrice, so still and so quiet. She's pale and bleeding. Guilt stabs at her, that she could've given the halo to her instead of Mary. Yet Beatrice, unfazed, nods, her voice hoarse with pain she says:

"In this life. Or the next."

"Amen," Lilith adds.

The Tarasks battle. Lilith flexes, her biceps a mosaic of flesh and flame. There's no pain now, just the sense that this is her true self, a burning shadow of the life now and the life after.

And Mary, whose face is so bright that even Lilith can't look her in the eye, says, "Come on, let's go. This time we finish it. Together."

.

.

_**END** _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading & reviewing! I had fun indulging my love for Warrior Nun in these 3 short fics :)

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to think Father Vincent was sincere. His tattoos are super interesting. This my interpretation of him being just an unwilling pawn in a greater spiritual game.
> 
> Thank you for reading! Grateful if you have any feedback!


End file.
